School days – Easter preparation and fun

It seems the final run up to Easter is full of fun for school children.  N’s school always have regular things for parents in the last Fridays of a term, so it’s all go and working out with work flexi time when I can get to the church service and open mornings. This half term worked out well.

Here’s this week’s School Days as we went into the Easter holidays.

Lambing trip

N had been so excited from the moment they were told they’d be going on a farm trip for lambing.  It turned out the farm they were going to is one where we do some farming, and N has met a few of the guys who farm there. And considering N is 7 years old and has had his own sheep for a few years now, he’s never seen a lamb being born. So his fingers were crossed.

Needless to say, lambing didn’t happen while they were there. Turned out the school who were there in the morning had seen 4 being born, so N was gutted.  (not that it mattered, because on Good Friday he ended up lambing a sheep himself – twin number one was successfully pulled out by him, while his uncle got the second twin out).

N said that the farmer showing them round remembered him, so he was a bit chuffed that he could answer lots of the questions.  A successful trip.

Fun swim

N does enjoy his school swimming but I’m glad I didn’t cancel his normal swimming lessons out of school. Because he’s still in the lowest group with school, which means being in the shallow end and having so many children swimming at once, I’m surprised there’s room.  Going twice a week has really helped him with his confidence and progress though.

The last week of term is always fun swim so they get the big floats and balls out.

SATs preparation and reading comprehension

Sometimes when you have children you feel like crying. And not just in despair, but to keep back the laughs as well.  But mostly despair this week.

N has always taken his time with reading, and it’s always been a fight to get him to read school books. As for home books, he’s read a few pages at a time of a few books in the early mornings. And sometimes he’ll read a page of bedtime story before I take over.  At parents evening earlier in the year, his teacher did say she was concerned about his SATs because he just won’t read questions. Even in maths which is his strength, he has a tendency not to read questions properly or at all.  It’s not that he can’t, because he can. He just won’t.

I got view of his laziness and refusal when it was open morning this week. Parents can go in, talk to the teacher and look at their child’s book.  N’s books also included some SATs practice papers. His maths was ok (the few questions he had wrong were silly mistakes, or not reading questions correctly). But his reading comprehension papers were terrible.  He just hadn’t read the text – not surprising when he’s used to reading books with pictures, and the papers include 2 full A4 pages of text for them to read.  He was just guessing at the answers – getting 3/20 and 7/20 was a surprise given he even admitted to the teacher in front of me that he didn’t read it. Sigh.

The teacher has said they’ll think about getting him someone to sit with him to make sure he reads the text. And obviously they’re practising their comprehension through the year. I’ve printed off some The School Run comprehensions, so hopefully we can get him reading them more frequently rather than just guessing. It’s so annoying that he doesn’t see how important it is to actually read things.

Easter fun

The children finished off their week with Easter celebrations. Their church service was the week before, but the final week of term is always the egg roll competition. Hard boiled decorated eggs, and a by class egg roll competition down the playground.  N was scornful of some children supposedly sellotaping their eggs, but I can’t believe they’d not been caught out and disqualified. N didn’t win, but he did come home with an Easter egg for winning the morning club Design an Easter Egg competition. I have to say I was impressed with his picture. He isn’t much of an artist usually, but he’d obviously put in a lot of thought about it.  It’s evidently a dog (rather than sheep) in the farm garden.  Complete with lots of Easter crosses.

What was your children’s last week of school like?